Bullets whip past James Bond as he sprints along the wooden quay. A sniper opens fire from a helicopter hovering above while 007, played by Pierce Brosnan, races through a labyrinth of pipes and bridges. Suddenly an explosion tears through this massive industrial plant run by the Russian mafia, a huge city in the Caspian Sea. Bond manages to leap into a vehicle conveniently equipped with a missile launch system and promptly shoots down the helicopter.
The backdrop of the floating city Bond battled his way out of in the 1999 movie "The World Is Not Enough" was built in Britain's Pinewood Studios -- but it was inspired by a very real location that counts as one the world's most astonishing cities: Neft Dashlari, far out in the Caspian Sea.
This area of Azerbaijan has been famed for its rich oil resources since ancient times. The "liquid fire" with which Constantinople drove the Arab besiegers from its walls in the seventh century consisted largely of oil that bubbled to the surface unaided along the coasts of the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Persians called the area the "Land of Fire," where priests lit their temples with oil from these natural sources.
The petrochemical industry didn't take off here until 1870 after Russia conquered the territory. In the years that followed, industrialists like Ludvig Nobel and the Rothschild brothers transformed the capital Baku into an oriental version of the French Mediterranean jewel of Nice. In 1941, Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union, was already supplying 175 million barrels of crude oil a year -- 75 percent of the country's entire oil production. That's why German forces fought so hard to try to seize the city and the surrounding Absheron Peninsula. They failed.
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